Customer Reviews

Chronicles Of Corum

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This volume collects the second trilogy in the saga of Corum Jhaelen Irsei and consists of "The Bull and the Spear", "The Oak and the Ram", and "The Sword and the Stallion". Corum, for those of you who are not familiar with Moorcock, is an incarnation of the Eternal Champion. In this trilogy, Corum is called into the distant future to assist in the battle against the Fhoi Myore. While there, he learns some important lessons about love and belonging.

I have to confess that Corum is probably my least favorite of the incarnations of the Eternal Champion-- I like both Elric and Hawkmoon better. All the same, you have the general elements of Moorcock greatness-- brooding reluctant hero, the companion & his cat, and a strong tie in to historical myth and legend.

Start with the Swords Trilogy, and not here, if you have read no Corum before. The backstory is helpful to understand character motivation, if nothing else.

Corum is the Eternal Champion, the last of a species destroyed by the gods (using the barbaric humans known as Mabden), he is doomed to fight against Chaos in different incarnations throughout time. I think Moorcock's melodramatic swords and sorcery tale is engrossing. Corum changes from a somewhat privileged member of a decadent, spiritual race into a battle-hardened tough survivor capable of defeating gods and arguing against "fate." Moorcock tells an old-fashioned tale very well. Not for everyone but I treasure my copy.

I first read the Chronicles of Corum when in high school over 25 years ago, and still re-read it every couple of years. It is a brutal sword-and-sorcery tale, but all the more real for its grinding, downbeat story. The exploration of the struggle for balance between chaos and law (allegorical at some level,I am sure) lends a sensibility to the story that is absent from far too many Sw&So tales. If you want gleaming knights in armor, the only one you will find is this book is not rescuing damesels in distress. A fine, disturbing tale.

Michael Moorcock, The Chronicles of Corum (Berkley, 1973)

Moorcock returns to the world of the Eternal Champion, in the guise of Corum, then rips him out of it. Over a thousand years after the events of the last novels, Corum has become worshipped as a demigod. His followers summon him into their time to do battle with extraplanar beings of (at most) animal intelligence known as the Cold Gods. The Cold Gods are dying, slowly, but they have every intention of taking all of humanity with them.

Together with the last of the Sidhi, a race of magic-using nonhumans roughly akin to elves in most fantasy worlds, Corum and those who worship him go to do battle with another force bent on destroying the planet.

The plot may get old, especially when so many fantasy novels by so many authors revolve around it. But it's still fun to read and easy to deal with. As with the first part of Corum's epic (The Swords Trilogy), Moorcock doesn't take as many chances with fantasy conventions as he does in the Elric novels, and so these are slightly less challenging to the reader's conceptions of what's "supposed" to happen in fantasy novels. Still, they're quite a bit of fun, for all they they're predictable. *** ½